WASHINGTON D.C. - U2's Bono, well recognized for his campaigns to reduce poverty and treat AIDS in Africa is backing a videogame which promotes the invasion and destruction of Venezuela in order to check "a power hungry tyrant" who has "seized control of Venezuela and her oil supply." Bono has failed to respond to concerns raised by the Venezuelan Solidarity Network about his funding of this project.

"Mercenaries 2: World in Flames," created by Los Angeles based Pandemic/Bioware Studios, simulates a mercenary invasion of Venezuela in the year 2007. Pandemic is a subcontractor for the US Army and CIA funded Institute for Creative Technologies, which uses Hollywood techniques to mount war simulations in California's high desert in order to conduct military training. "Mercenaries 2: World in Flames" simulates destruction in downtown Caracas, and promises to leave no part of Venezuela untouched.

Elevation Partners is an investment firm that Bono helped create in order to exploit marketing opportunities between U2 and its fans, including projects from Pandemic/Bioware Studios. Pandemic states that as a partner in Elevation Partners, Bono "has visibility into all projects at Pandemic and Bioware."

Pandemic's target market is young men of military recruitment age and indeed this is not Pandemic's first military adventure. MSNBC reported that the videogame “’Full Spectrum Warrior’ was created through the Institute for Creative Technologies in Marina Del Rey, Calif., a $45 million endeavor formed by the Army five years ago to connect academics with local entertainment and video game industries. The institute subcontracted work to Los Angeles based Pandemic Studios."

(http://msnbc.msn.com/id/3131181#storyContinued)

One cannot escape the irony that today, July 5, Venezuela celebrates its independence -- just one day after the US celebrated its own. The most enduring aspect of an independent country is assertion of its sovereignty and demand that the world recognize international laws protecting that sovereignty. Yet, amid relentless US threats against Venezuela, a US-based company, Pandemic, which collaborates with the US Army to promote war, plans to market a videogame which advocates a most violent violation of Venezuela’s sovereignty.

Although Bono remains silent on the matter and Pandemic insists that "Mercenaries 2: World in Flames" is "a work of fictional entertainment" and "Venezuela was chosen for the setting of Mercenaries 2 (because it) is a fascinating and colorful country full of wonderful architecture, geography and culture," members of the Venezuela Solidarity Network are appalled by the game's openly racist, interventionist attitude. Says Chuck Kaufman, of Alliance for Global Justice, "if it's 'just a game' and it's all about selecting fascinating and colorful locales, why didn't Pandemic select Dublin or Washington, D.C.? Because people would be outraged, that's why. Pandemic is simply capitalizing on negative and inaccurate U.S. press stories about Venezuela and its leader, Hugo Chavez, in order to make a quick buck. It's another piece of anti-Venezuelan propaganda that serves only the U.S. military, pure and simple."

Gunnar Gundersen of the Oregon Bolivarian Circle says, "We have family and friends in Venezuela and many of us have walked and stayed in the places featured in the war game. To us, these are not just clever abstract pictures. They are scenes of a place we consider our second home. Please try to imagine how Venezuelans must feel viewing a bulky, blonde, military man laying waste to their country, a country that is finally rising above a 500-year history of oppression and exploitation by foreign powers."

The Venezuelan Solidarity Network calls for Bono, who has appealed to the world on many occasions for peace and poverty reduction, to apply those same values to block the manufacture and distribution of this videogame.

For more information contact: Shirley Pate at +1-202-277-8252

http://oat.tao.ca/node/view/486

redrat11

02-09-2007 06:34 PM

Re: U2 Bono Backing Venezuela-Invasion Video Game

Excellent post SeC.

02-09-2007 10:46 PM

Re: U2 Bono Backing Venezuela-Invasion Video Game

Bono's Hypocrisy Betrays Third World Aid Scam
Keeping Africans in chains while herding Westerners into the same prison cell

Paul Joseph Watson & Steve Watson/Prison Planet.com | August 8 2006

Bono's latest efforts to dodge taxes and invest in the very capitalist franchises he supposedly rallies against prove that he is one of the leading characters in a puppet show that, far from helping emaciated kids in Ethiopia, serves only to keep the third world in chains while herding Westerners into the same debtor slavery prison.

It's commonly acknowledged that of the estimated $500 billion that has been poured into Africa over the last 40 years, the majority has gone no further than ruling dictators who keep the money and use it to bankroll their opulent lifestyles while their disease ridden subjects starve to death and are infected with AIDS from poisoned vaccines generously donated to them by billionaire philanthropists who advocate mass population reduction and genocide.

The only way to truly elevate the third world is to give them the tools to build the infrastructure necessary for modernization.

But the World Bank/IMF/Globalist doctrine is not about improving the status of third world countries, its about bleeding westerners dry in the name of fighting poverty and AIDS and then siphoning off the profits to their own dirty cronies. Bono is a figurehead for this policy and was even in contention for the World Bank crown before losing out to arch Neo-Fascist Wolfowitz..

World Bank and IMF documents betraying a focused agenda to deliberately foment economic turmoil, riots, and then enforced bondage to eternal debt in countries like Argentina have been leaked.

The plan is not to elevate the third world but to lower the living standards of Americans by guilt-tripping them into financial sacrifice in the name of humanitarian disasters created by the globalists themselves, in addition to a global tax at the fuel pump mandated by the imaginary specter of global warming.

Meanwhile, Bono shifts his assets to offshore tax havens to avoid paying the very taxes that he campaigns for - this is the height of hypocrisy and exposes the beast that the U2 singer fronts for.

He has also recently purchased a large minority stake in Forbes Media, which owns Forbes Magazine, a celebration wealth, consumption and elitism.

No doubt Bono would also embrace the virtues of the 'global warming' orthodoxy elite who zoom from each scripted press conference in their air-conditioned luxury jets while preaching that Americans must take their SUV's to the knacker's yard.

Notable therefore it is that Bono himself once ordered his favorite hat to be flown first class via British Airways to Italy at a cost of $1700.

The Wall Street Journal listed ten ways Bono could have put the money towards relief for the poor instead of ensuring he achieved just the right balance of urban cool for the gig that night.

Bono has always fitted the mold of the elitist yuppie icon, an image that is perfectly encapsulated in Bret Easton Ellis' novel American Psycho, a work set in the 1980s but written a decade later, that typifies the seedy underbelly of American yuppie culture.

The Chapter Title is "Concert". The Narrator, Patrick Bateman, is a designer-label-wearing, drug-taking, Wall Street broker, who happens to torture and kill women in his spare time. The names of the other characters are not important. They go to a U2 concert almost by default and end up in the front row. There he feels a "connection" with Bono - the connection is of course a hideous, shallow and superficial yuppie connection that reveals more about Bono and his place in culture than it does about Bateman, who we already know is a horrid human being.

The much vaunted Live 8 and 'Make Poverty History' campaigns last year, organized in part by Bono, were again co-opted by controlling corporate interests and did little if nothing to help worldwide suffering.

Smaller charities were banned from participating and after the event it emerged that establishment charities like American Red Cross, World Vision and Oxfam had secretly met and divvied up a huge slice of the booty between themselves and kept it - as happened after the OKC bombing and September 11.

Veteran journalist Jon Pilger summed it up better than I ever could during last year's G8 meeting in Scotland.

"Africa's imperial plunder and tragedy have been turned into a circus for the benefit of the so-called G8 leaders due in Scotland next month and those of us willing to be distracted by the barkers of the circus: the establishment media and their 'celebrities.' The illusion of an anti-establishment crusade led by pop stars—a cultivated, controlling image of rebellion—serves to dilute a great political movement of anger. In summit after summit, not one significant 'promise' of the G8 has been kept, and the 'victory for millions' is no different. It is a fraud—actually a setback to reducing poverty in Africa. Entirely conditional on vicious, discredited economic programmes imposed by the World Bank and the IMF, the 'package' will ensure that the 'chosen' countries slip deeper into poverty."

In his many meetings with the British Prime Minister, Bono has failed to mention the fact that Blair's £15 million ID database system, used to monitor and control the lives of the British public with no discernable benefit to anyone but government snoops and mega corporations, would cover the cost of anti-retroviral drugs in Africa for the next three years.

Bono and Blair were playing bosom buddies for the cameras once again last weekend as they hob-knobbed with Rupert Murdoch, while informed speculation postulated a visit to the creme de la creme of old boy networks, Bohemian Grove.

Whilst Bono hangs around doing business with his elite pals then occasionally sounding off at them for the media, rock stars such as Thom Yorke of Radiohead take a more modest approach at illuminating their wrong doings.

When Yorke's dissenting voice became more prominently public last year he declined an invitation to meet with Tony Blair because he knew it would be spun into a PR device by Blair's cronies.

"I came out of that whole period just thinking, I don't want to get involved directly, it's poison. I'll just shout my mouth off from the sidelines. It's a nasty business. It's up to people with pure integrity who know what they're talking about," said Yorke.

Whilst Yorke continues to use his rock status to berate Blair over his continued elitist and ignorant policies, Bono is using his to hob nob around with Blair in San Francisco on a personal business trip paid for by British taxes, a system that Bono clearly believes he is too good for.

This in comparison to my version shows that you are lost on a wild goose chase and focusing on a source that was provided to you – a synthetic target as usual. It is more than common. Do you know that the aforementioned are less than puppets? They are barely shadows on a wall.